What strategies do you use to increase your blog traffic? Have you been adding content but struggling to gain visitors to your site? This article will explain seven effective ways to drive traffic that you should use from the day you start a blog.
Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase through the links, I may receive a commission at no cost to you. Please read my disclaimer for further details.
Table of Contents
1. Quality Content
The most significant thing you can do to drive traffic to your site is by providing quality content. Yes, this will take time.
However, quality content will help gain repeat visitors, encourage visitors to share your content, and improve search engine ranking.
Taking the time to produce excellent content is more important than increasing the frequency of posting.
Furthermore, having poor content will drive readers away from your site.
You may decide to outsource some of the article writing for your website.
Outsourcing is not a bad thing.
However, ensure that you review the content or have an editor to make sure you have consistent, high-quality material.
Answer your Audience’s Questions
This tip could really stand on its own. But I think it is part of producing quality content.
Pay attention to what your audience wants. You are more likely to increase your blog traffic if you are providing what people desire.
Pay attention to reader comments.
Respond to them.
When you receive similar questions in the comments, it is an indicator it is a good topic to address in its own post.
Your readers are more likely to return to your site if you are available to them.
However, if you ignore their desires, they will ignore you.
Another excellent way to find questions related to your topics is to use this tool.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
While writing for your audience needs to be your priority, incorporating SEO in your writing is close behind.
Using a tool like SEMrush for keyword research is an excellent way to improve your ranking in search engines.
The work of SEO to increase your ranking takes time, so you should incorporate it from the start.
2. Social Media
Sharing and promoting your blog on social media can be an excellent way to drive traffic.
Organic search traffic from Google takes time to build up as your domain authority grows. So using social media can help gain traffic before (and after) that organic traffic starts coming to your site.
While social media is a good tool to utilize, don’t focus on too many at once.
Pick the social media that you are most comfortable with and that you believe your niche will have the most success with.
If you try to focus on multiple paths, you likely won’t make as much progress and you’ll be taking away time from other important activities you should be focusing on.
Try and focus on one social media platform. Move on to others after you have established yourself and have a system in place to maintain your profile.
Pinterest is one of the best ways to drive traffic to a new blog, or any blog for that matter. It is more like a search engine than a social media platform.
People go to Pinterest to find content instead of being social with others. Additionally, with a tool like Tailwind, you can schedule pins over an extended period of time. So you don’t have to be active on Pinterest every day and you can focus on creating content for your blog.
Another great resource for helping you create pins is finding freelancers on Fiverr. Outsourcing some of your work can free up your time to focus on other aspects of your site.
Additionally, you can find help on Fiverr for just about anything else related to your blog, including website setup, graphic design, logo design, and much more.
While I don’t recommend focusing on more than one platform, make sure you set up an account on the other platforms to ensure nobody else creates an account in your blog’s name.
3. Attention-Grabbing Headlines
A captivating headline is going to help get attention for your posts.
List articles (like this one), “how-to” articles, and “why” articles are popular with readers.
For the most part, visitors scan articles.
Therefore, having bulleted or numbered lists makes it easy for them to find what they are looking for.
Similar to the previous tip, posing a question as the title of your blog post will help get traffic.
After all, when people are searching for something on Google, they are typically asking a question.
Just be sure to answer it in the article.
An excellent tool for helping you improve your headlines is CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer.
4. High Performance
Speed matters.
If your website is slow to load, readers are likely to click away.
Additionally, the slow performance of your site will impact your search engine ranking. Use a site like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to measure the performance of your website.
If your page is slow, it will provide details that you can address to increase the performance. This can include slow plugins, oversized images, or inefficient code, among other things.
Additionally, your web host may be causing your slowdown. You may want to consider changing to a host like SiteGround. They have moved their hosting to Google Cloud servers which provides several performance enhancements.
5. Guest Posts
Writing posts for other blogs can have a major impact on increasing your blog traffic by creating backlinks.
Network with other bloggers and get to know them. Write about them in your posts and let them know about it.
This will open up opportunities to post on other sites. Furthermore, it will lead to greater exposure for your own site through backlinks.
There are some “White Label” SEO service providers like The Hoth that offer to perform these services for you.
A service like that could be an option to have outreach and guest posts done for you, but I’d proceed with caution. I’m not confident the ROI and risk associated with essentially paid links are worth it.
6. Pictures/Visuals
A post with nothing but text is not reader-friendly. Especially if the post is long.
Additionally, avoid long paragraphs. It makes your post harder to read, especially on mobile devices.
Pictures and visuals, especially infographics, increase reader engagement.
Additionally, your posts are more likely to be shared with others if it includes useful pictures or infographics.
Always include the Alt Text for any images to help Google know what the image is about.
7. Comment on Other Blogs
Visiting other blogs in your niche and commenting on their posts, as well as answering questions in the comments of their posts, is another great way to gain credibility.
As you do this more and more, you will gain credibility with others in your niche.
This will lead to people being interested in learning more about you and your site which can lead to valuable backlinks.
Related:
Website Traffic: Not All Traffic is Good
Productivity Hacks for Bloggers
Summary
In conclusion, there are many ways to increase traffic to your blog. By following the methods above, you can help to drive traffic to your site.
And hopefully many repeat customers and shares!
While only 7 methods were discussed above, there are many more. What methods have you used to increase traffic on your blog? Please share them in the comments below.
